War Poetry Types

The Invective. This type of poem is a verbal attack, and Jonathan Swift, satirist and political journalist, excelled in making them. The following excerpt was composed in 1722 to mark and mock the death of John Churchill, decorated general and first Duke of Marlborough:

A SATIRICAL ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF A LATE FAMOUS GENERAL His Grace! impossible! what dead! Of old age too, and in his bed! And could that mighty warrior fall? And so inglorious, after all! Well, since he's gone, no matter how, The last loud trump must wake him now: And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger, He'd wish to sleep a little longer.

And could he be indeed so old As by the newspapers we're told? Threescore, I think, is pretty high; 'Twas time in conscience he should die. This world he cumbered long enough; He burnt his candle to the snuff; And that's the reason, some folks think, He left behind so great a s—k.

The Historical. Lord Byron, English poet and Greek national hero (he fought with Greeks in their war of independence against the Turks), penned this immortal work about an invading king whose armies met with the plague during a 701 B.C. siege of Jerusalem:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

The Memorial. Herman Melville, who volunteered for service in the Navy during the Civil War (but was rejected), commemorated the battle at Shiloh Church in Tennessee in which about ten thousand soldiers on each side perished:

The Character Study. Walt Whitman, who tended to and cheered the wounded on both sides during the Civil War, characterized a soldier who suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome in this haunting excerpt:

THE ARTILLERY MAN'S VISION While my wife at my side lies slumbering, and the wars are over long, And my head on the pillow rests at home, and the vacant midnight passes,

The Chronicle. Edward Thomas, English poet and private soldier, wrote this 1917 account, describing the scene and his thoughts on a typical day during war shortly before he was killed in France:

FEBRUARY AFTERNOON Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw, A thousand years ago even as now,

The Elegy. Canadian physician, soldier and poet John McCrae, who died in 1918, eulogized the dead with this famous poem written while under fire:

The Protest. Social activist and populist Carl Sandburg composed this piercing antiwar poem that still echoes through the ages: